The present disclosure relates to information retrieval.
Information retrieval systems, such as Internet search engines, help users by retrieving information, such as web pages, images, text documents and multimedia content, in response to search queries. A search engine locates and stores the location of documents in a searchable index used to facilitate fast information retrieval. The search engine may use a variety of statistical measures to determine the relevance of the documents in the index to the user's query to identify and provide search results.
Formulating a search query that accurately represents the user's information need can be challenging. As a result, the search engine may identify a number of resources which match terms in the user's query, but which are unrelated to the actual information need of the user. The user may thus have to enter a number of different queries during the same search session. Although these queries are different, the search results returned from the search engine may be quite similar because these queries relate to the same information need of the user. In such a case, the same highly ranked search results may be provided to the user multiple times during the search session.